Lexus LFA returns - but not as we know it

If the Gazoo Racing GT is Toyota taking a wild punt, the battery-powered LFA is Lexus hedging its bets

By PH Staff / Friday, 5 December 2025 / Loading comments

Clearly, Toyota knows what the fallout is when you pluck a concept from the ether and call it a Lexus LFA. Thanks to the rule of automotive follow-through (you don’t sell a guy one car, you sell him five cars over 15 years), success is meant to be longstanding. But the LFA famously appeared in 2010 and died two years later. In other words, it was like Buddy Holly: prodigiously, expansively good - but too mould-breaking to be easily replicated.

Truthfully, the new GR GT, a combustive shot in the dark if ever there was one, is a better and more faithful follow-up than a BEV sports car (appropriate, given the way the Lexus badge was grafted on Toyota’s masterpiece). But not to cash in on the LFA’s cache would be no less of a crime, hence the Lexus LFA Concept, a car apparently intended to embody its maker’s “Shikinen Sengu” principle of techniques and skills being passed on by car-making veterans to a younger generation.

Back in the real world, what we’re talking about is (broadly speaking) an EV built on the GR GT’s underpinnings - i.e. the high rigidity, all-aluminium frame was there to be exploited, and thanks to the packaging flexibility of batteries and e-motors (not to mention the flexibility of a premium brand increasingly associated with electrification) the zero-emission LFA was virtually inevitable.

With those three letters in play, Lexus was keen ahead of time to note the ‘three key elements’ supposedly at work in the concept’s gestation - low centre of gravity, low weight and aerodynamic efficiency - though on the basis that it released no additional technical information ahead of the LFA’s unveiling, it would be safe to assume that model is very much third in the pecking order behind its V8-powered siblings.

Frankly, that status feels appropriate given the low regard for high-end EVs more broadly, and even Toyota freely admits both the exterior and interior of the LFA were revealed as the ‘Lexus Sport Concept’ during Monterey Car Week. Its svelte silhouette remains (inheriting its predecessor’s ‘sculptural beauty while displaying classic coupe proportions’, according to its maker), though without anything further to go on, it’s hard to leave one’s pram in excitement.

‘The model name “LFA” is not bound to vehicles powered by internal combustion engines. It symbolises a vehicle that embodies technologies its engineers should preserve and pass on to the next generation. From the past to the future: the Lexus LFA Concept is a testament to how Lexus is preserving and passing on the value of sports cars and car-making knowledge so they can be retained and evolved.’ Make sense of that, and you’ll have a middling idea of where Toyota is going with battery-powered high performance.